An engineer in California has been arrested on suspicion of trying to kill a co-worker by poisoning her for more than a year.

Berkeley police arrested David Xu, 34, last week on charges of premeditated attempted murder resulting in great bodily injury and two counts of felony poisoning, according to jail records.

Xu is accused of poisoning the food and drink of Rong Yuan, a fellow engineer at Berkeley Engineering and Research, on multiple occasions over the course of 18 months, according to court documents.

Prosecutors have not specified a motive for Xu's actions.

Yuan noticed “a strange taste or smell” coming from her water and food left unattended in her office, the documents said.

After consuming the food and drink, she reported “immediate and significant health problems” that sometimes required emergency care.

In November and December of last year, two of Yuan’s relatives, who were not identified in the documents, also experienced health problems after drinking water from a bottle Yuan brought home from work.

Blood samples from all three showed elevated levels of cadmium.

Ingesting food or water with high levels of cadmium, a silver-white metal found in the Earth’s crust, “severely irritates the stomach, leading to vomiting and diarrhea, and sometimes death” according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

Prolonged exposure can also lead to kidney damage and bone fragility, the agency noted, and the EPA has labeled it a probable carcinogen.

Cadmium was also one of the toxic substances found at the home of a German man who police believed may have fatally poisoned up to 21 of his co-workers.

Yuan was eventually able to view surveillance footage from her office in which she says she saw Xu putting a substance into her water bottle in February and March, according to court documents.

Water samples taken from her bottles on those days contained a "toxic amount of cadmium."

Utah Man Charged with Killing His Mother and Hiding Body in Bedroom Closet

by Jessica Schladebeck

A Utah man accused of killing his mother and then hiding her body in the bedroom closet of their mobile home has been arrested, police said.

Uriah Lee Scott was being held at the Oakland County Jail on a murder charge in the death of Cynthia Scott and was denied bail during his initial court appearance over the weekend, according to a press release from the Troy Police Department.

Authorities in Troy responded to the home in Shelley on March 20 after a relative called them to perform a welfare check, claiming they had not seen or heard from Cynthia Scott since March 18.

Over the course of their investigation, officers found the 61-year-old mother “dead in a bedroom in the home, concealed under some items and partially in a closet,” according to the police press release.

According the Oakland County Medical Examiner, her cause of death was blunt force trauma.

Authorities said 42-year-old Scott had recently moved in with his mother, but that he was arrested at a residence in Oak Park that he’d been sharing with a friend.

He reportedly had been staying there since March 18.

Another resident at the Shelley home was also arrested, but has since been released without charges.

Man Who Tipped $22K at Nashville Hotel Bar Arrested on Public Intoxication Charge

by Natalie Neysa Alund

Metro police on Monday arrested a Bellevue man on public intoxication charges after he tipped servers $22,000 at a downtown hotel bar.

It all started when friends of Joel Boyers called police after they said they received strange texts from him about taking drugs that "increased his intelligence" and drinking while carrying a gun.

"He also made bizarre statements about giving away his child on Facebook," according to his arrest affidavit.

Police said when officers found Boyers at the JW Marriott hotel on Eighth Avenue South, he admitted to drinking all day and smoking marijuana while carrying his firearm.

Hotel staff told police he'd also caused a disruption at the bar because he made several high-dollar tips — amounting to $22,000 — and waitresses were competing to serve him, something hotel management said interfered with the operation of the bar.

Boyers eventually gave police his firearm, which was in his right front pants pocket.

Officers said because he had bloodshot, watery eyes and smelled of alcohol, they arrested him on charges of public intoxication and possession of a firearm while intoxicated.

Davidson County Sheriff's Office records show Boyers was booked into the jail just after 6 p.m. and posted bond several hours later.

Award-winning journalist Maria Ressa was freed on Thursday in the Philippines after posting bail.

"What we're seeing is death by a thousand cuts of our democracy," Ressa told reporters at the Manila court Thursday, according to The Associated Press.

She accused the government of using the law to silence criticism.

She was arrested on Wednesday at the headquarters of Rappler, the news outlet she runs in the Philippines, the latest in a deluge of legal attacks on the journalist by President Rodrigo Duterte's government.

Ressa, 55, is a former CNN bureau chief.

She was among four journalists, including the murdered Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi, named by Time magazine as Person of the Year for 2018.

Since starting Rappler in 2012, Ressa has not been afraid to cast criticism on the government as a result of the news website's investigations into impunity and corruption.

Plainclothes officers from the National Bureau of Investigation, an agency within the Department of Justice, arrived at Rappler's offices in Manila around 5 p.m. local time Wednesday.

As law enforcement served the warrant, staff were told to stop taking photos and videos.

"We'll go after you too," an officer told reporters, according to Rappler.

Ressa was charged with cyber libel by the Philippine's Department of Justice.

"These legal acrobatics show how far the government will go to silence journalists, including the pettiness of forcing me to spend the night in jail," Ressa said in a statement.

The charge traces back to a story published in May 2012, months before the country's cyber crime prevention law was approved in September.

(MONTGOMERY, Ala.) — Alabama has scheduled a lethal injection for a man convicted in the 1997 deaths of four people, including two young girls.

The Alabama Supreme Court set a May 16 2016 execution date for Michael Brandon Samra."Be there or be square!"Samra was convicted of helping his friend Mark Duke kill his father Randy Duke, his father's girlfriend Debra Hunt and her 6 and 7-year-old daughters.

Authorities say Mark Duke killed his father, Hunt and one of the girls, and Samra slit the throat of the other child.

Prosecutors said the slayings happened after Duke became angry when his father wouldn't let him use his truck.

Both of them were sentenced to death.

Duke's death sentence was reversed because he was 16 at the time of the crime.

(West Palm Beach, Florida) - A former Florida police officer was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday for fatally shooting a black motorist who was awaiting a tow truck in October 2015.

Nouman Raja, 41, was fired from the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department shortly after he killed Corey Jones, 31, while on plainclothes duty, and was convicted last month by a jury of manslaughter and first-degree murder.

The conviction was unusual in a country in which police officers kill roughly 1,000 people each year, a disproportionate number of them black men, usually without facing prosecution, according to a Washington Post database on police shootings.

Jones' relatives asked Judge Joseph Marx to give Raja the maximum sentence of life in prison during the sentencing hearing.

The judge said it was a "heartbreaking" case before handing down the sentence of 25 years, the minimum required under state law, for both counts, to run concurrently.

Police said Raja was in plainclothes and driving an unmarked van when he encountered a car he thought was abandoned on a West Palm Beach highway exit ramp on Oct. 18, 2015, a few hours before sunrise.

Jones was in the car, waiting for a tow truck. Prosecutors said Raja never identified himself as a police officer and that the officer acted aggressively in a way that likely led Jones to mistake him for a robber.

Police said Jones pulled out a handgun that he had legally purchased three days earlier before Raja fired at him six times within 13 seconds.

Raja hit Jones three times and Jones died of a gunshot wound to his chest.

Raja's defense team has argued that their client feared for his life when Jones drew his gun.

Jones' relatives read statements describing Jones, a professional drummer, as a religious man and dedicated musician.

Raja's wife and other relatives pleaded for leniency for what they said was a bad decision in a difficult moment doing a dangerous job.

His lawyers condemned the notion that Raja, as a Muslim man of Asian descent, was motivated by racial prejudice.

Sheila Banks, Jones' godmother and aunt, called Jones a "gentle soul," and choked back tears as she pictured his dying moments.

"No one was there to hold his hand, to comfort him, to save his life," she told the court.

"The person we trusted to serve and protect did not."

Raja appeared in prison overalls, his head bowed and his hands clasped during testimony from both his relatives and the victim's.

His lip trembled with emotion as his wife described how he had sent three letters a day from prison, one each for her and their two children.

Raja's elder brother, who continues to work as a police officer, apologized to the Jones family and complained that Raja had been unfairly treated for what he called "a bad decision."

In a news conference after the sentencing, Benjamin Crump, a prominent civil rights attorney who represented Jones' family, listed a string of high-profile shootings of black men by police in recent years in which officers were not charged.

"Today we can tell many of those families that there's hope for America," Crump said,

"because a jury in Palm Beach, Florida, looked at all the evidence and said a black man killed by the police can get equal justice."

Anna Sorokin, the fake German heiress accused of swindling friends and businesses out of hundreds of thousands of dollars to bankroll her lavish Manhattan lifestyle, was found guilty on Wednesday.

According to the New York Post, Sorokin was found guilty on eight counts— including first-degree attempted grand larceny. She reportedly faces 15 years behind bars and will be sentenced on May 9.

Known in New York’s social scene as Anna Delvey, Sorokin reinvented herself when she arrived in the United States from Germany in 2016, posing as a wealthy socialite when she was in fact the daughter of a Russian truck driver, prosecutors said.

After traveling the world and living in expensive boutique hotels, the 28-year-old was arrested in October 2017 and charged with grand larceny and theft of services for allegedly stealing about $275,000 in a 10-month spree.

During her three-week trial in Manhattan Supreme Court, Sorokin declined to take the stand on her behalf, and her attorney, Todd Spodek, didn’t put on a defense case.

The “SoHo grifter’s” case garnered national attention followingNew York Magazine and Vanity Fairarticles last year that detailed the lengths Sorokin went through to convince close friends, banks, and financial institutions she was a foreign heiress with unlimited funds.

Manhattan prosecutors alleged Sorokin told “lie after lie” to maintain the lavish lifestyle she couldn’t afford, often providing forged financial records and bank statements to persuade others she had millions of euros overseas.

Sorokin, who told friends she’d moved to New York to start a private art club, lived out of hotels with an overdrawn account, dined at trendy restaurants without paying the tab, and even hired a personal trainer for $300 a session, prosecutors said.

“She knew if she told people she had this money, they would trust her, that eventually she would be good for the deal,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Catherine McCaw said in her closing arguments.

“In fact, she had no ability to pay and no intention to pay.”

To prove Sorokin’s disregard for money, prosecutors detailed in court how she once spent $40,000 in just eight days.

While staying at the W Hotel in Manhattan, she allegedly “barricaded herself” in her room and refused to let anyone inside, eventually spending $679 in miscellaneous expenses.

To fund her private art club, the 28-year-old allegedly created bogus bank statements while applying for a $22 million loan, creating a “team of imaginary assistants” in an effort to expand her credit line.

Sorokin blamed this “team” when there were problems with wire transfers—at which point her plan begin to unravel, prosecutors said.

“All of the defendant’s wire transfers are merely a figment of her imagination,” McCaw said. “These are not white lies. These are lies that help you understand that the defendant, in fact, had criminal intent in this case.”

Prosecutors called more than two dozen witnesses to provide damning testimony against Sorokin, including Rachel Williams, a former friend whom she invited on a supposedly free trip to Morocco.

Williams said she was forced to pay the $70,000 tab when Sorokin couldn’t cover the bill.

“I wish I had never met Anna. If I could go back in time and not be where I am today, you bet I would,” Williams, a former Vanity Fair photo editor and author of the 2018 article, said last week. “In hindsight, it’s easier to figure out the times where there were red flags. But at the time, I did not find it strange.”

The defense, however, argued that Sorokin was just living by the old adage “fake it till you make it,” like New York musician legend Frank Sinatra.

“Sinatra made a brand-new start of it in New York, just as Miss Sorokin did,” her lawyer, Todd Spodek, told jurors in court on Tuesday.

She “was ambitious, she was persistent and she was determined to make her business a reality,” he said.

Admitting her lifestyle may have been “unethical and unorthodox,” Spodek insisted in his closing arguments that Sorokin was “enabled every step of the way by a system that favors people with money.”

Though Sorokin did not speak, the trial was delayed several times over wardrobe concerns.

As previously reported by The Daily Beast, Sorokin hired former Glamour magazine editor Anastasia Walker to dress her for court appearances, a move her lawyer said was important since her style is a “driving force in her business, and life, and it is a part of who she is.”

Her courtroom outfits have even inspired an Instagram account, Anna Delvey Court Looks, which has currently amassed over 3,000 followers.

A Florida man was arrested for impersonating a police officer after reportedly pulling over an undercover cop.

Matthew Joseph Erris, 26, of Dade City was booked into the Hillsborough County Jail on Tuesday and released on bond, charged with impersonating a public officer.

Erris was arrested after sheriff’s deputies say he used red and blue lights installed on his vehicle’s grill to pull over an undercover detective, according to a report from WFLA, an NBC affiliate in Tampa.

WFLA reports the undercover detective then called 911 to report the traffic stop, and Erris was apprehended by real law enforcement shortly after.

In the ensuing search, deputies found an airsoft pistol and a law enforcement light bar installed atop the Chevy Trailblazer he was driving.

A 59-year-old cemetery manager and two of his employees chased a truck that had been stolen from the cemetery and blocked it in until a deputy arrived and arrested the man accused of stealing it, according to a police report.

The manager of Floyd’s Greenlawn Memorial Gardens spotted the truck Monday afternoon that had been reported stolen from the cemetery.

The manager followed the truck as other employees joined the pursuit, the report said.

When the truck pulled into a gravel lot near the intersection of Gossett and Campground roads, the employees blocked it in.

A deputy said he found the only occupant of the truck was 45-year-old Kenneth Ray Bradley.

The deputy said Bradley refused to speak because he did not want to incriminate himself.

The deputy said there was a large amount of property in the truck that the cemetery manager said did not belong to the business.

The police report said the items seized from truck included tools and a large number of vehicle keys.

The deputy said there was a paper license plate on the truck, and the proper tag was found inside the vehicle.

The truck was returned to the cemetery manager, the police report said.

The deputy said a background check found that Bradley had multiple convictions for property crimes, so he was charged with possession of a stolen vehicle with enhancement.

Anyone with two prior property crime convictions within the previous 10 years in South Carolina can be charged with felony property crime with enhancement.

Doctor arrested for wife's murder after saying she died falling down stairs

by ABC News

A Southern California doctor has been arrested for the murder of his wife, years after he said she died falling down stairs.

When officers responded to Dr. Eric Sills' San Clemente home on Nov. 13, 2016, the doctor told deputies he woke up to find his wife, 45-year-old Susann Sills, dead at the bottom of the stairs after an apparent fall, the Orange County District Attorney's office said.

Eric Sills is the medical director of a fertility clinic co-founded by Susann Sills, according to The Orange County Register.

The Sills were married for over 10 years and had children together, Eric Sills' father told the Southern California News Group.

In November 2017, Susann Sills' death was ruled a homicide by the coroner's office.

Prosecutors have not said how she died.

Her family declined to comment to ABC News on Wednesday.

A spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office would not elaborate on what led to Eric Sills' arrest, but said "there was additional investigation that was needed."

The 53-year-old doctor was on his way to work when he was arrested April 25 on suspicion of murder, prosecutors said.

The prosecutor's office has not disclosed any evidence or possible motive.

Sills was booked into the Orange County Jail and posted a $1 million bail on Tuesday.

"Once this transfer was complete both computers were collected by Des Moines police as evidence."

Watson told investigators in an interview that he was the only person who used the password-protected computer, police said.

He also described several of the images discovered on the device and admitted to labeling the files as “13 year old” and “14 year old’s,” according to the complaint.

When detectives asked him to explain himself, he said he downloaded the images "to tell other people about them," according to the complaint.

Best Buy did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment, but a company spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that its "Geek Squad" discovers suspected pornography on devices nearly 100 times each year.

"They don’t search for the material, but inadvertently discover it in the normal course of repairing a computer," Best Buy public relations director Paula Baldwin told BuzzFeed.

"When we do find what appears to be child pornography, we have a legal obligation to notify law enforcement and we inform our customers of this prior to doing any work. Law enforcement determines a course of action based on the evidence, as they did in this situation."

Watson was arrested on Tuesday and charged with 10 counts of possession of child pornography.

He was being held at the Polk County Jail on a bond of $50,000 as of Thursday.

He has not entered a plea and it was unclear if he had retained an attorney.

(ROCKVILLE, Md.) — A wealthy stock trader is seeking a new trial after his murder conviction in the fiery death of a man who was helping him secretly dig tunnels for an underground nuclear bunker beneath a Maryland home.

Daniel Beckwitt's attorneys asked a Montgomery County judge on Monday to schedule a hearing for their written request for a new trial.

On April 24, a jury convicted Beckwitt of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter in the September 2017 death of 21-year-old Askia Khafra.

The 27-year-old faces up to 30 years in prison at sentencing set for June 17 2019.

Beckwitt's lawyers argue the evidence presented to jurors was insufficient "as a matter of law" to support his convictions.

They also claim prosecutors improperly used photographs of extreme hoarding conditions in Beckwitt's suburban Washington home.